The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

The revelation of the depths to which women can sink is always a stunning one.  

Looking over the clearance table at Wonderbooks in Frederick, MD, while I waited for the pan-Asian restaurant in the same complex to finish cooking our takeout dinner, I spotted a Penguin paperback of P. G. Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins.  The book's cover illustration was still floating around in my cranium a few days later and so I decided to read the novel.

Wikipedia tells us that The Luck of the Bodkins had a strange publication history.  It was first serialized in Britain in the magazine The Passing Show in 1935, and then serialized in the American magazine Redbook a few months later, but in a version rewritten by Wodehouse to make it shorter.  When the novel was released in book form the British editions presented the longer version, while the U. S. publisher printed the shorter version. I read the 2002 Collector's Wodehouse printing of the book that some generous soul scanned and put up at the internet archive; I believe this is the British version--it is like 350 pages of text, after all, which seems pretty long.  

The Luck of the Bodkins is a light-hearted tale of men being manipulated, dominated, and generally run ragged by women, men doing things that go against their natural inclinations in order to please or appease members of the opposite sex.  There is a pretty large cast of characters, but I think these six are the important ones:    

Montague Bodkin

He worshipped Gertrude Butterwick as no man had worshipped woman before.

Monty is a good-looking Englishman who is a poor speller.  He inherited a pile of money from an aunt and is not interested in working.  He is deeply in love with and engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, daughter of businessman J. G. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price & Mandelbaum, Import and Export Merchants.  Mr. Butterwick refuses to let his daughter marry a man who is not gainfully employed, and so Monty took a series of jobs, promptly being fired from each of them.  Finally, he bribed the head of a detective agency to hire him so he would at least appear to be gainfully employed.  In Chapter 1 Monty is vacationing in Cannes when he receives a devastating telegram from Gertrude back in Blighty: she is breaking off their engagement!

Ivor Llewellyn

Mr. Llewellyn shuddered.  That word 'divorce' had always been a spectre. haunting him.  His attitude towards his young and lovely wife ever since their marriage had been consistently that of a man hanging by his finger-tips to the edge of a precipice.

Mr. Llewellyn is the middle-aged and obese head of a Hollywood film studio.  He has a beautiful young wife, Grayce, whom he goes out of his way to please lest she divorce him.  In the first chapter of the novel he is vacationing in Cannes while Grayce is in Paris, shopping.  The domineering Grayce sends Mabel Spence, her sister, to Cannes to tell the movie mogul that she (Grayce) has purchased a pearl necklace and he (Llewellyn) must smuggle it into America when he sails back across the Atlantic.  Mabel will give it to to him, sewn into a hat, when she boards the Atlantic, the ocean liner which he will board in England, stops to collect passengers, she among them, in France.  Llewellyn is paranoid about getting caught committing this crime, and assumes U. S. Customs spies are everywhere.  When in Chapter 1, Monty, who is hanging around the same hotel as Llewellyn, comes over to ask Llewellyn and Mabel how to spell "sciatica" (a malady with which J. G. Butterwick is afflicted), Llewellyn suspects Monty is a Customs spy who has overheard Grayce's felonious instructions coming out of Mabel's mouth.  

Gertrude Butterwick

'Well, it's about that Blossom girl.  Oh, I know,' said Gertrude, as Monty began to fling his arms heavenwards, 'that there's absolutely nothing between you.  But oh, Monty darling, will you promise me to never speak to her again?'

Monty's on and off again fiancé, Gertrude, comes on screen in Chapter 2.  Gertrude is very jealous; for example, when she and Monty were at the cinema she took offense when she noticed her fiancé admiring the performance up on the silver screen of American actress Lotus Blossom.  We eventually learn that Gertrude called off their engagement because, in a photo of himself bathing he sent to her, Gertrude noticed on Monty's chest a tattoo of the name "Sue" in a heart--this is a souvenir from an earlier, brief, engagement of Monty's.  Gertrude is a top hockey player, and is headed to America on a tour with the All England Ladies Hockey Team; she will also be sailing on the Atlantic.

Reginald Tennyson

'The family are sending you off to Canada to work in an office....Well, it's about time.  Work is what you want.'

'Work is not what I want.  I hate the thought of it.'

Reggie is another English slacker ("loafer" is the word used in the text), but he lacks the kind of wealth his friend Monty enjoys and his family (lead by his uncle, that strong proponent of gainful employment J. G. Butterwick) is sending him to Montreal to toil in some office; by coincidence he will be on the Atlantic as well; in Chapter 2 he is surprised to run into his hockey-playing cousin Gertrude at the train station where they are both catching the train to the port where they will board the Atlantic.  In Chapter 3 he finds himself in the same train car as his crony Monty--Monty explains that he has booked passage on the Atlantic in hopes of confronting Gertrude and winning her back. 

Ambrose Tennyson

'Have you ever read any of Ambrose's bilge?'

'No.'

'Well, it's absolute drip.  Not a corpse or a mysterious Chinaman in it from beginning to end.  And this fellow Llewelyn is paying him fifteen hundred dollars a week!'

Reggie's brother Ambrose is a writer of serious literature that does not sell and has been holding down a responsible government job--the Tennyson family is always badgering Reggie, telling him to be more like his brother Ambrose.  As the novel starts Ambrose is making a change in his life, however.  He has resigned from the Admiralty and accepted a lucrative job offer from Ivor Llewellyn to write scenarios in Hollywood, and is accompanying Llewellyn on the Atlantic.  Perhaps even more importantly, Ambrose is engaged to American actress Lotus Blossom, who will be travelling along with them.

Lotus Blossom

Life, to be really life for her, had to consist of a series of devastating rows and terrific reconciliations.  Anything milder she considered insipid.

A sexy red-headed film actress, born a Murphy in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union, Lottie is an exuberant type who loves drama and fun; as a publicity stunt she brings with her on the ship a wicker basket containing a pet alligator named Wilfred.  Her engagement to Ambrose has been kept a secret from Reggie--symmetrically, the fact that some years ago she was engaged to Reggie has been kept a secret from Ambrose.

Characters of lesser prominence who nevertheless play pivotal roles in the novel's intricate clockwork mechanisms include Grayce's sister Mabel Spence, an osteopath with whom Reggie falls in love after she provides him some hands-on treatment, and Albert Peasemarch, a long-winded and overly-chummy steward on the ship whose butting in and gossiping adds to everybody's trouble.  Peasemarch is the weakest component of the novel--his scenes slow down the narrative and the jokes featured therein are among the least effective in the book--he mispronounces many words, for example.  When overeducated English goofs like Monty and Reggie or deceptive Hollywood jerks like Llewelyn and Lottie, all of them people who can be selfish and act like they are above society's rules, expose their ignorance it is funny in part because it punctures their pretensions, but when an essentially inoffensive working-class guy mispronounces words and is inordinately proud of his meager accomplishments it is a little sad, and laughing at him feels like, as the social justice types say, "punching down." 

On the voyage there are bouts of jealousy and a series of comic misunderstandings that put everyone's relationship with his or her spouse or fiancé at risk.  Ambrose is jealous when he learns of his brother Reggie's past relationship with Lottie.  Monty convinces Gertrude that Sue is long forgotten, but then Gertrude becomes jealous when she finds Lottie's stateroom is right next to Monty's and she breaks off their engagement again.  Lottie's forward fun-loving nature, which has her kissing Reggie and spending time in Monty's room, is a major source of difficulties.

Llewelyn thinks Monty is a government spy onto his smuggling plans, and so he tries to bribe Monty by offering him a job as an actor; Monty has no interest in being an actor and refuses the offer.  Llewelyn fires Ambrose upon realizing he is not the famous poet Tennyson (the Hollywood mogul missed the news that the author of "Charge of the Light Brigade" died forty years ago), sparking Lottie's descent in Machiavellian ruthlessness.  Lottie kidnaps from Monty's room a plush Mickey Mouse, a gift Monty gave to Gertrude after their reconciliation and which Gertrude returned when she broke off their engagement the second time.  Now that they have reconciled a second time, Gertrude is expecting Mickey back from Monty.  Lottie demands that Monty accept the acting job offer from Llewelyn so he (Monty) will be in a position to force Llewelyn into rehiring Ambrose--otherwise she will parade around the ship clutching the Mickey Mouse, which will no doubt presumably lead to Gertrude again breaking off her engagement to Monty.  Monty's negotiations with Lottie are hampered by the fact that he has promised Gertrude he will never again speak to Lottie.

There is a bracing quality about the streets of New York, and only a very dejected man can fail to be cheered and uplifted by a drive through them in an open taxi on a fine summer afternoon.

The last fifty pages of this epic saga take place in beautiful New York City, where everybody comes to his or her senses and everything works out perfectly for all the young attractive people, with all of them engaged to each other and employed by Llewelyn's studio at exorbitant salaries (in the middle of the Depression, no less!)  Even overweight and middle-aged Ivor Llewelyn and Albert Peasemarch accomplish their goals, though the path to success for them lies through considerable humiliation.   

Like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin books, Wodehouse's books are all expertly crafted, their narrative structures and each individual sentence skillfully put together, and they are all quite enjoyable, but each one is very much like any other one.  And while you can argue O'Brian's naval adventure stories perhaps say something about male relationships and duty and courage and so forth, it is hard to argue that Wodehouse's books are anything more than frivolous entertainment, albeit in its highest form, wish-fulfillment fantasies for men who covet a life of leisure and respectable irresponsibility.  The Luck of the Bodkins is a smooth read that makes you laugh and inspires admiration for the author for having fashioned such a superior piece of workmanship, but the novel doesn't move you emotionally or challenge you by presenting an idiosyncratic view of the universe or life or morality or by offering speculations about life under different circumstances.  

Of course, like all old books, The Luck of the Bodkins offers a window for those of us living in the 21st century onto another culture--it is a primary source from the world of the past.  The world of Monty and Reggie is one in which everybody smokes cigarettes, people casually mention Greta Garbo and Ronald Colman and say of a generous friend that he is "The whitest man I know," a world in which even men who avoid work like it is a plague are ashamed to marry a woman who has more money than they do.  Wodehouse expects his readers to get jokes about Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Stafford Cripps, to know something about the Crusades, and to find it amusing that almost everybody in the book is familiar with the poem "Casabianca" but confidently misattributes its authorship.

If you are looking for a few laughs and a little of the atmosphere of the 1930s, this novel fits the bill.  Thumbs up for The Luck of the Bodkins; it is likely I will soon read the sequel, which was published over 35 years later, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin.